John Podesta knocks greens on natural gas

White House adviser John Podesta took aim Wednesday at environmentalists who have criticized the Obama administration’s support for natural gas.

“If you oppose all fossil fuels and you want to turn that switch off tomorrow, that is a completely impractical way of moving toward a clean-energy future,” Podesta told reporters during a roundtable discussion at the White House.

Text Size

-

+

reset

“With all due respect to my friends in the environmental community, if they expect us to turn off the lights and go home, that’s sort of an impractical suggestion,” he added.

Podesta’s comments were in line with the administration’s long-running talking points, but they‘re likely to anger many in the liberal wing of the environmental movement, which has launched increasingly aggressive attacks against fracking and liquefied natural gas exports.

And they signal that the former president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress isn’t afraid to part ways his his former compatriots to make the case for the president’s climate agenda, a topic he said he spends about half his time working on.

Podesta’s comments come one day after the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, 350.org and a slew other green groups called on President Barack Obama to reject calls to speed up permits to export U.S. liquefied natural gas, arguing that the policy would violate the administration’s pledge to tackle climate change.

Asked about the criticism, Podesta spoke generally, saying the country would benefit if more power plants relied on gas.

“So I think we remain committed to developing the resource and using it, and we think there’s an advantage, particularly in the electricity generation sector, to move it forward,” he said.

Over the past few decades, about half the U.S. power supply has come from coal-fired power plants, which emit twice as much carbon dioxide as plants that run on natural gas.

He shrugged off the call for Obama to step back from LNG exports, saying that the Energy Department was in charge of reviewing the export applications. The department is considering applications on a plant-by-plant basis.

John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, also defended natural gas, which some greens say is not as climate friendly as the administration or the energy industry claims because of stray methane emissions from wells and pipes.

“The basic story on methane, including from the LNG sector, is that the emissions are definitely big enough to be worth reducing, but they’re not big enough to imperil the advantage that natural gas has over coal as a way to generate electricity,” Holdren told reporters at the meeting.

Podesta said the Obama administration is “in the throes” of finalizing an administration-wide strategy for tackling methane leaks from oil and natural gas development and that the plan should be issued “in the not-too-distant future.”

Many green groups and energy experts have raised red flags about methane, the main component of natural gas and a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane leaks during natural gas production and processing contradict the assertions that it’s a cleaner alternative to coal development, some environmentalists argue.

But Holdren said fixing the leaky wells, pipelines and processing plants can solve the problem.

“What you’ll see when the strategy comes out is a variety of focuses on how to reduce emissions. We think there are a lot of opportunities for doing that that will simply magnify the advantage that natural gas has over coal in electricity generation and also potentially over gasoline in vehicle propulsion,” Holdren said.

The environmental community is far from unified on natural gas. While more liberal groups like the Sierra Club and 350.org have been critical of natural gas development, the Environmental Defense Fund is working closely with industry groups to come up with solutions to the methane problem.

Holdren and Podesta acknowledged that most countries face huge challenges to meeting their global warming target of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

“Obviously, the longer the world delays in taking aggressive action to reduce emissions, the more challenging it becomes to meet that target. And I would say it is now very challenging indeed,” Holdren said. “But what is perfectly clear is we know the direction in which we need to go. We need to reduce emissions and have a variety of tools for doing that, and we are using as many of them as we can.”

Podesta said the administration is developing its post-2020 climate plan as part of international climate change talks that will culminate in a meeting in Paris in 2015.

“We’re at work on putting forward the commitment that the United States will make, and we have a commitment to do that by the first quarter of 2015,” he said.

Podesta also talked about the tension in Ukraine and the administration’s effort to help reduce Europe’s dependence on Russia for natural gas.

“Of course we’re taking steps to — some immediate steps — to assess Ukraine both in the short term and the midterm to reassure and ensure energy security in conjunction with our European partners,” he said.

But speeding up approval of LNG applications won’t have an impact on the Ukraine crisis in the short term because the companies aren’t slated to begin exporting LNG until at least 2015, he said.

“We don’t anticipate a gas interruption. The Russians earned $50 billion per year of sales from exports to Europe. But given the way things have gone, we are obviously watching this closely,” he said.

Podesta declined to weigh in on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline. Because he has criticized the project in the past, Podesta has said he won’t work on the pipeline during his time at the White House.

“The president knows my views on Keystone and I’ve said that I’m not working on it and I’m not working on it,” he said.